PALERMO, Italy, Jan 16 (Reuters) – Italian police on Monday arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, the nation’s most wished mafia boss who had been on the run since 1993, swooping on a non-public hospital within the Sicilian capital Palermo the place he was present process therapy.
Prosecutors say Messina Denaro, 60, is a boss of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia.
He had been sentenced in absentia to a life time period for his function within the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Police mentioned they detained him at Palermo’s “La Maddalena” hospital on Monday morning, within the metropolis’s northern suburbs. Images on social media confirmed locals applauding and shaking arms with police in balaclavas as a minivan believed to comprise the suspect was pushed away.
Messina Denaro had been having appointments at the hospital for a while, Italy’s Ansa information company reported, including that police had secretly moved officers into the constructing in a single day to safeguard different sufferers.
Italian information companies mentioned he’s believed to be affected by most cancers.
Messina Denaro additionally faces a life sentence for his function in bomb assaults in Florence, Rome and Milan which killed 10 folks the next 12 months.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the arrest as “a great victory for the state that shows it never gives up in the face of the mafia”.
“EXTRAORDINARY EVENT”
The arrest comes virtually 30 years to the day since police arrested Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the Sicilian Mafia’s strongest boss of the twentieth century. He ultimately died in jail in 2017, having by no means broke his code of silence.
“It is an extraordinary event, of historic significance,” Gian Carlo Caselli, who was a prosecutor in Palermo at the time of Riina’s arrest. The reality the arrest coincided with the Riina anniversary made it much more important, he added.
However, he mentioned Cosa Nostra had up to now proven its capacity to outlive the arrest of senior figures and regroup.
Police mentioned in September 2022 that Messina Denaro was nonetheless capable of subject instructions regarding the best way the mafia was run within the space across the western Sicilian metropolis of Trapani, his regional stronghold, regardless of his lengthy disappearance.
Messina Denaro, who comes from the small city of Castelvetrano close to Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or collectively answerable for quite a few different murders within the Nineteen Nineties.
In 1993 he helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an try and dissuade his father from giving proof in opposition to the mafia, prosecutors say. The boy was held in captivity for 2 years earlier than he was strangled and his physique dissolved in acid.
extra reporting by Angelo Amante, writing by Keith Weir and Cristina Carlevaro, modifying by Federico Maccioni, Gavin Jones and Nick Macfie
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